A challenge, yes, but not a mission

Ex-LPGA pro to play men for fun of the game

July 20, 2003|By Paul Doyle, Tribune Newspapers: Hartford Courant.

Amid the cluster of boys at the practice tee, the 9-year-old arrived wearing shorts and a T-shirt over her wet bathing suit.

Suzy McGuire didn't care much for the swimming pool, so she roamed away from her big sister and congregated with the golfers. She grabbed a club and started hitting balls, sending many farther than any of the kids around her.

The adults stopped and watched. Suzy kept teeing off. There was no looking back.

"She was the only girl out there, but she didn't care," said her mother, Mary Ann McGuire. "From the minute she started, she loved it."

And from the minute she started, she was always competing with and against the boys, thinking nothing of it. This week Whaley will be in that familiar spot--the only female in a field of 156 at the Greater Hartford Open.

Whaley's passion for golf began about 25 years ago at a country club near Syracuse, N.Y. Mary Ann McGuire, also a golfer, left her daughters Tracy and Suzy at the club pool one day.

The next day, Suzy was on the course with the club pro and a group of boys. For the rest of the summer, she was on the course with her mother.

Every summer thereafter, she was working at a driving range or playing somewhere.

It hasn't changed much for Suzy Whaley. Only now she is on the other side of the golf obsession, passing on the joys of the sport as the head pro at Blue Fox Run Golf Course in Avon, Conn.

In the months since Whaley, 36, decided to participate in the GHO, the question on many minds has been: Why would an otherwise anonymous club pro from Connecticut subject herself to such chaos by participating in a PGA Tour event?

Look no further than that 9-year-old at the practice tee for the answer.

"I love to teach golf," Whaley said. "But I especially love to teach young girls who like it and are doing it because they like it. I was like that as a kid. For me, it's fun to turn kids onto golf. If [playing in the GHO] will help do that, then it's worth it."

Year-round competitor

Suzy had two passions. From early childhood, she loved to ski and blossomed into a talented downhill racer. And from 9 on, she spent her summers golfing.

"We were very athletic, but my mom did a great job of keeping us in different sports so we didn't have to compete against each other," Tracy said. "For me, it was much easier that way when you have a sister with so much talent. ... She always had a lot of gifts athletically--tennis, golf, running, swimming. It seemed like everything she did growing up, she excelled at."

Whaley may be physically gifted, but her most useful tomboy trait might have been her unflappable personality. Whaley had no trepidation about being the only girl in a group, whether she was on a golf course or a ski slope.

"She just didn't know any better," Mary Ann McGuire said. "She was never bothered by anything. That was her personality."

A few years after Suzy began golfing, the McGuires found a teacher for their daughter. Joe Tesori, then an assistant pro, found a prodigy.

"She was the first girl that I ever gave lessons to that literally gave me chills when she hit the ball," Tesori said. "She was phenomenal."

Whaley was 11 when Tesori became her teacher, but her talent was obvious. She didn't simply drive the ball, she wound up and hit it with nearly flawless form.

From the moment he began working with her, Tesori was certain Whaley could go far with her golf game. But she was winning medals in junior ski events in the winter and seemingly had as bright a future in her winter passion.

Skiing took her to Green Mountain Valley School in Vermont for her junior year of high school. Whaley calls skiing her first love, the sport she may well have pursued had she not sustained a compressed vertebra during a fall while skiing.

When Whaley returned home after her fall, ski racing fell behind golf.

"There's no telling how good she would have been," Grunert said. "Maybe that would have been her main sport in college. She was that good."

Beating the boys

As Whaley approached high school, she was determined to play on the golf team at Jamesville-DeWitt High. But there was not a girls team and there had never been a girl on the boys team.

"That was a bit of a crisis," Mary Ann said jokingly.

Not for Suzy. She was popular at school, friendly with boys and girls. She didn't know sports as gender-separate activities, so being the only girl at tryouts was not unusual.

"We had girls try out over the years, but she was the only one to ever make the boys team in the 17 years that I coached," said Alex Donadoni, the golf coach at J-D High until 1990. "But she was such a good player. An excellent player and, of course, a great kid. And I don't ever remember there being any uproar about her being there."

Whaley played on the junior varsity before spending two years on the varsity. She played with a core of teammates that became one of the best teams in the region during her senior year in 1984.